Ultrashort optical pulses (i.e., optical pulses less than about 100 picoseconds) are useful in various areas of research and development as well as commercial applications involving time-domain analyses. For example, ultrashort optical pulses may be useful for time-domain spectroscopy, optical ranging, time-domain imaging (TDI), and optical coherence tomography (OCT). Ultrashort-pulses may also be useful for commercial applications including optical communication systems, medical applications, and testing of optoelectronic devices and materials.
Conventional mode-locked lasers have been developed to produce ultrashort optical pulses, and a variety of such lasers are currently available commercially. For example, some solid-state lasers and fiber lasers have been developed to deliver pulses with durations well below 200 femtoseconds. However, for some applications, these pulse durations may be shorter than is needed to obtain useful results, and the cost of these lasing systems may be prohibitively high. Additionally, these lasing systems may be stand-alone systems that have a sizeable footprint (e.g., on the order of 1 ft2 or larger) and appreciable weight, and may not be readily portable. Such lasing systems and their driving electronics may be difficult to incorporate into an instrument as a replaceable module, or even be incapable of being incorporated into a hand-held device. As a result, ultra-short pulsed lasers are often manufactured as a separate stand-alone instrument from which an output beam may be coupled to another instrument for a particular application.